Blog

At Outright Development, we are determined to provide your company exactly what it needs to succeed in this digital world. We specialize in web application development, mobile app development, API & web services development, and data & content integration. Our team delivers personalized software development services for a wide array of industries. To broaden our client base, we decided to create a profile on Clutch, which is an online platform that publishes unbiased reviews of B2B agencies. To verify the reviews on their site, Clutch speaks with past and current clients to interview them about their experiences partnering with our [...]

What’s your web application back-up plan? You’ve invested money and time into your web application development project and now have it running live on your server - congratulations. Your hosting provider tells you that they have weekly back-ups in place. You can now sleep at night, right? Well, not necessarily. It’s critical to understand what is being backed-up, how, and how often. Your back-up strategy should be tied to being able to recover your application if disaster strikes. Web Application Components To develop an approach to back-ups, you will first need to understand the various components of your application and [...]

Since Apple is rolling out the iOS 10 release this week, we thought we would highlight some of the most noteworthy new features that we can now take advantage of for building into our customers' custom mobile apps. iMessages Extended Probably the biggest iOS 10 feature for app developers is the release of a wide range of APIs for extending the iMessage functionality. It is now possible to perform interactive tasks inline, inside of iMessages such as play games, make payments, and edit photos by being able to invoke the functionality of other apps that are installed on the user's device. We can now create custom UIs within messages which will enable [...]

Outright Development wishes everyone a Happy New Year! Our custom mobile app group has a number of interesting projects underway, and 2017 promises to be an exciting year in terms of new trends in mobile app development. We thought we'd share some of our predictions for trends in business-related app development in 2017 with you: Virtual Reality (VR) apps will enable businesses to engage with prospects and customers 2016 proved that VR apps can be an effective tool for user engagement. Look for an expansion of VR apps in 2017 with an eye toward business as a way for marketers to engage interactively [...]

Drupal 8, the latest version of the popular open source content management system (CMS) was released in late 2015 with a number of great new capabilities and features as part of its core. But should you build using D8 now, or should you use Drupal 7? Well, that depends. If your current website/application or planned new website is relatively simple, and does not depend on a lot of contributed modules, then you might consider using D8. But for more complex sites that are new, or existing sites that depend on contributed modules, we recommend that you stick with Drupal 7 for now because as with [...]

Although Node.js has been around since 2009, it is a technology that has gained a lot of momentum in the past year and one in which customers will frequently inquire about. However, it can be easily misunderstood with respect to how it can be best used in web application development. Node.js is a web technology platform that is installed on a web server and is built in JavaScript. It is very good at enabling high volumes of data to be sent between the server-side application and the end-user's browser in real or near real time (for example a website that has live chat functionality). It enables many [...]

The Drupal CMS is a powerful platform for building websites and often the need arises to import data into your CMS in bulk such as product data, or company listings, etc. For this, the Drupal Feeds module is a great tool. But what if you need to get your data OUT of Drupal? Luckily there's the Views Data Export module which provides an easy way to export existing data out of Drupal and into some common file formats. Use Case Our client had imported some data into a distributor database that we had built as part of their website. The initial data was imported using [...]

What is Faceted Search? Faceted search (sometimes called "faceted browsing" or "faceted navigation") is a way for users to filter search results by fielded data (the “facets”) that are related to the items in the search results. Faceted search allows users to narrow down their search results by selecting one or more facets to filter on. For example, we have a client who sells drawer slides (the things on drawers that allow the drawers to slide in and out of a cabinet) via an ecommerce website. Users can navigate to see search results for the drawer slide section and can then filter their [...]

Now that Apple Watch is starting to ship (although slowly, it seems), we’ve been getting a steady stream of inquiries about developing apps for it, and for adding Apple Watch functionality to our customers’ existing apps. However, there seems to be some confusion about how Apple Watch apps “work” and best practices around user experience. If you are thinking about building an Apple Watch app, or adding Apple Watch functionality to an existing iPhone app, then there are some usability considerations that you should keep in mind: There really isn’t such a thing as a stand-alone Apple Watch app (at least at the [...]

The use of fonts in a website is a common discussion point with customers. This article provides a high level overview of the various options for displaying fonts on the web, along with their advantages and disadvantages. For us at Outright, the discussion usually arises after the customer and/or their designer has created a nice design for a new website and then hands the design over to us for implementing the code of the website. This is usually when it’s discovered that the fonts that were chosen during the design process are not “public domain” and/or may not be commonly available on most PCs [...]